Yahoo Launches oneConnect (and free SMS) for iPhone

[Jeff]

Yahoo! today launched a new, free application for iPhone and iPod Touch users called oneConnect.

oneConnect has a rather ambiguous name which makes sense once you understand it's purpose. oneConnect attempts to give you one application to connect to all your various social networks. Of course, it connects you with all your contacts in your Yahoo! Messenger friends (which can include Windows Live Messenger users), but oneConnect also connects you to your contacts on many of the most popular social networks. Which networks? How about Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, Youtube, Bebo, Dopplr, Friendster and Twitter, for starters?

There are a number of interesting features in oneConnect. First of all, the contacts button shows a complete list of all your contacts, regardless of which network they belong to. Your Yahoo! Messenger friends, Twitter contacts and Facebook buddies all show up in one big list. The general idea is that this will make it easier for you to stay in touch, since you can use "one app to rule them all."

oneConnect screenshots

    

You can see the latest photos from your Flickr contacts, or Twitter updates from that network, and so on. But probably one of the most intriguing features is also the least obvious -- free SMS (that's text messaging, for the acronym-impaired). This is significant because here in the U.S., AT&T does not include text messaging with the new iPhone 3G phones -- you have to pay extra for a text plan, or pay-as-you-go (I call it "pay-through-the-nose").

The SMS feature lets you use Yahoo Messenger to send and receive text messages to any contact in your list using a cell phone with a U.S. number. Sorry rest of the world, this one's just for U.S.

I'm interested in trying this app, since I 1) have an iPhone, 2) have a Yahoo! Messenger account, 3) use Flickr and Twitter regularly. The other networks aren't really so important to me, but I'll give it a try and report back shortly. Meanwhile, iPhone users can get oneConnect now from the iTunes store.

Link to oneConnect (launches iTunes App Store)

[Gandalf]

This is GREAT! It works a lot like Ping.fm, allowing me to update all my social networks at once. Is there a web-based version though?

[Jeff]

You can run oneConnect on a variety of mobile phones, but I have tried to find a web-only version to no avail. If anyone knows of a way, please let us know!

[Fanatic]

I saw oneConnect on another phone (not an iPhone) and it still looks pretty good. You've pretty much gotta have unlimited internet if you're gonna use it much, though.

On the iPhone it looks really sweet.

[Jeff]

The Yahoo! Messenger blog has announced the release of an update to oneConnect for the iPhone that includes stability and performance improvements.

You can get the update for free from the iTunes App Store.